The Army is hiring analysts to handle procurement management, policy and oversight, according to a post on USAJobs.

The analysts will help develop contracting policy for the Department of the Army and provide guidance for contracting functions. This process will include reviewing current contracting activities in order to assess effectiveness and efficiency.

The analysts will serve in the office of the deputy assistant secretary for the Army for procurement and will participate in reviews of acquisition programs. According to the job posting, the analysts may serve as the focal point for cost, pricing and finance issues.

The Army is accepting applications through March and listed the salary range as between $74,872 and $155,000.

The Army’s $7.6 billion project to develop an advanced, high-tech replacement for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle hit a speed bump Friday when SAIC filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office against the service’s Aug. 18 award of technology development contracts for the new ground combat vehicle to BAE Systems and General Dynamics. The contracts have a combined value of $878 million.

When the Army TACOM Life-Cycle Management Command (formerly the Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command) released the procurement for the ground combat vehicle in November 2010 it said, “The Army anticipates awarding up to three contracts for the technology development phase.” But, in a surprise move, the service tapped only BAE and General Dynamics.

SAIC partnered with Boeing Co. and two German companies, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Rheinmetall Defence, which developed the Puma infantry fighting vehicle for the German army. The Puma went into production in 2009 and serves as the basic design for the group’s ground combat vehicle.

Vernon Guidry, an SAIC spokesman, said the company filed its protest because, “we believe the government relied on evaluation criteria outside its published request for proposal. We also believe several aspects of the bid may have been discounted because of a lack of familiarity with [the design’s] non-American origins.”

Lt. Col. David Gercken, an Army spokesman, said the service issued a stop-work order to BAE and General Dynamics until the protest is resolved. Ralph White, managing associate general counsel for procurement law at GAO, said a decision on the protest is due by Dec. 5.

The Army needs a new armored troop carrier able to withstand improvised bombs like those that have caused more than 60 percent of the troop casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also wants a vehicle capable of carrying a nine-man infantry squad. Those requirements have pushed its weight into the 60-ton range, said Mark Signorelli, vice president and general manager for weapons systems at BAE.

Despite this hefty tonnage — just eight tons less than the Abrams tank — Signorelli said BAE plans to take the Toyota Prius approach to developing its version of the ground combat vehicle. He said BAE’s vehicle will use hybrid-electric drive technology and include a battery pack that will supplement power from a diesel engine.

The design of the BAE ground combat vehicle, Signorelli said, is a proven, similar to diesel electric locomotives, with the engine serving as a generator, applying power directly to traction motors that power the tracks.

Robert Sorge, senior director for the ground combat vehicle at General Dynamics, said his company considered a hybrid vehicle, but given the weight, a hybrid design “did not make a lot of sense . . . It’s not practical and is more expensive.”

General Dynamics said it will stick with proven diesel engine technology and drive trains, he said.

The Army also wants developers to provide a vehicle with built-in command-and-control systems as well as optical and radar sensors that can provide a 360-degree field of view to the crew, both BAE and General Dynamics executives said.

Communications system for the ground combat vehicle will be built around a network integration kit supplied by the Army, Sorge said. This kit includes Boeing’s Joint Tactical Radio System Ground Mobile Radio, the Army’s Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below system that tracks and displays friendly and hostile forces on the battlefield, and a computer system that ties displays and keyboards into the network.

The Army has a tight, seven-year schedule to develop, test and then field 1,800 ground combat vehicles. An Army source said he doubted the SAIC protest would put much of a crimp in the schedule.

The service has fielded more than 6,700 Bradley Fighting Vehicles since it was first introduced in 1981.

Science Applications International Corp. filed a protest Aug. 26 against the Army’s award of Ground Combat Vehicle technology development contracts to two teams led by BAE Systems and General Dynamics Land Systems, according to a published report.

Officials at SAIC, whose team included Boeing Co. and a German company, contend that the Army made “errors in the evaluation process” and “chose not to appropriately integrate existing, proven technology into a comprehensive solution,” as the service looked at the three bids to develop its new infantry fighting vehicle, SAIC spokeswoman Melissa Koskovich said in a statement to Defense News.

General Dynamics’ group, which includes Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Co., received a $440 million contract. BAE Systems, which teamed with Northrop Grumman Corp., received a $450 million award.

The Army wasted more than $1 billion a year from 1996 to 2004 and more than $3 billion a year from 2004 through 2009 on major programs that eventually were canceled, according to a review of the service’s acquisition process released Thursday.

The 2010 report put the blame for the broken Army acquisition process on “erosion of the core competencies of the personnel responsible for the development of requirements and the acquisition of systems and services.”

The review was conducted by an outside group chaired by Gilbert Decker, who served as assistant secretary of the Army for research, development and acquisition from 1994 to 1997, and retired Army Gen. Louis Wagner, who served as commander from the Army Materiel Command from 1987 to 1989.

The Army said it plans to hire close to 2,000 acquisition workforce personnel by 2015 in response to the recommendations in the Decker-Wager review.

The review also faulted the complex requirements process, which delayed development and fielding of systems due to a process that takes as long as two years to come establish conditions for acquisitions based on commercial products, such as information technology systems.

The Decker-Wagner review was based on interviews with more than 100 former high-ranking Defense Department and Army officials as well as defense industry executives. Army Secretary John M. McHugh said he planned to adopt 63 of the report’s 76 recommendations. .

The review acknowledged that in many cases its recommendations echo hundreds of other high-level reviews and studies of the Defense and Army acquisition process, going back to a 1986 commission chaired by David Packard of Hewlett-Packard Corp., who served as deputy secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1971.

The 2010 review invoked Packard, who, in his 1986 take on acquisition reform, asked, “We all know what needs to be done. The question is why aren’t we doing it?”

At a media briefing Thursday, Thomas Hawley, deputy undersecretary of the Army, provided the 2011 answer to that question, “If it was easy . . . we would have done it a long time ago.”

In 2007, Jacques Gansler, former undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, delivered a report on the service’swartime contracting that found the Army’s civilian and military contracting workforce is stagnant or declining, and he recommended hiring 1,400 additional contracting personnel.

The Decker-Wagner report said the service still faces a shortage of contracting personnel, as well as systems analysts and engineers, and the Army has recommended hiring an additional 1,885 personnel in these fields by 2015. The recommendation [the report or the Army’s recommendation?] cautioned, however, that “it takes well over a decade to mature a systems engineer with domain expertise.”

The Army lacks a database to help it scope the size of the acquisition workforce, the Decker-Wagner review said. “Getting data on such basic questions as how many systems engineers the Army has and what are the trends in quantity and qualifications, proved impossible,” the 2010 review said.

The Army also lacks historical information on lessons learned from its acquisition programs, such as cost and schedules. The Decker-Wagner review recommended the service develop a database that incorporates this historical information along with acquisition workforce data.

Army acquisition officers lack operational experience, so the Decker-Wagner review recommended — and the service endorsed — a plan to assign them to operational field units for tours of about a year so they can gain a better understanding of operational requirements before returning to design and develop future systems.

The Army also endorsed a recommendation in the 2010 review that acquisition officers be assigned to the Army War College and Command and General Staff College.

The Army should emphasize rapid acquisition, compress requirement reviews, eliminate excessive documentation, encourage competitive prototyping, and expand the use of fixed-priced and incentive-fee contracts, the 2010 review recommended, and the Army agreed.

Heidi Shyu, acting assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said at the press briefing that the service views the 2010 review as a framework for an “achievable, affordable and realistic” approach to acquisition.

The Army’s Comanche helicopter was envisioned as “the quarterback of the digital battlefield,” a technologically superior aircraft that could hide from enemies, operate at night and in bad weather, and travel farther than any other helicopter.

Gen. Richard Cody, a former vice chief of staff of the Army, called it the “most flexible, most agile” aircraft the country had ever produced.

In 2000, it ranked as the most important planned buy for the Army. Four years later, the program — which had consumed close to 20 years of work and nearly $6 billion — was abruptly shuttered.

It is one of 22 major Army weapons programs canceled since 1995, ringing up a price tag of more than $32 billion for equipment that was never built. A new study, commissioned by the Army and obtained by The Washington Post, condemns the service’s efforts as “unacceptable.”